What can be bought with Oklahoma football coach’s salary

What can you do with 3.5 million Washingtons?

 

Bucky took a Web whirl:

Pay for Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan “¦ through 2009. Buy the property of Tulsa’s iconic (but demolition-slated) Camelot Hotel (complete with moat and drawbridge). Cover the operating expenses of schools shorted in the recent legislative budget, according to Treasurer Scott Meacham in reports. Add 30-plus full professors at the University of Oklahoma, or “¦ pay OU head football coach Bob Stoops his annual salary.

 

Yup, you read that right: Stoops’ nearly $3.5 million salary the last academic year was the highest of any U.S. college football coach, who make on average about $918,000, according to a study released last week by the American Association of University Professors.

“If paychecks reflect the value of an individual to the university and its core educational mission, then Division I-A head football coaches are, on average, 9.4 times more valuable than their full professor colleagues,” the AAUP report states. “By this metric, the head football coach at the University of Oklahoma is 36 times more valuable than an average full professor at his university.”

Hmm “¦ not that these findings surprise any of us here at Skeptical U. And some of us like our sports ” especially from the winning sideline. But, according to the report, even university presidents are less highly paid.

“The University of Oklahoma apparently values its football coach (11) times as much as its president,” the report continues. (OU prez David Boren garners a base salary of $311,000, according to The Oke.)

For his part, Bucky just wishes that if the powers that be aren’t gonna equalize the salary disparity, they’d at least contribute some pocket change toward renovating the bathrooms in OU’s likely never-to-be-updated English, etc., buildings.

This is 2007. Isn’t it time all the stalls had doors?

This article appears in Apr 18-24, 2007.